The Nineteenth Century , No 182, Apr 1892 [‎106r] (216/244)

1892 NOTICEABLE 701
of which the first five essays are portions, and which, as the author tells
us, he formed very early in life, was to help towards a better under
standing of the Christian creed by exhibiting the religious teaching
of the great masters of Hellenic and Roman thought. It is the more
to be lamented that this intention has not been fully carried out,
since no one, so far as I know, has treated the subject quite in the way
which Dr. Westcott proposed. Of course the recognition of a pro
phetic element in the teaching of those ancient sages is nothing new.
On the contrary, it is as old as Christianity. Clement of Alexandria
calls philosophy i a schoolmaster to bring the Hellenic mind, as the
law the Hebrews, to Christ.' Nay, St. Paul speaks of one of the
poets of the Greeks as ' a prophet of their own.' But no one, I think,
has anticipated the Bishop of Durham's design ' to show how far the
Gospel satisfies our natural aspirations, and illuminates dark places in
our experience,' by tabulating, so to speak, the hopes and the desires,
the errors and the silences, of' those wise old spirits, 'as Jeremy Taylor
happily calls them, ' who preserved natural reason and religion in
the midst of heathen darkness.' Only Plato, ^Eschylus and Euripides
are thus treated in the volume before us. The other essays, indeed,
especially those on Dionysius the Areopagite and Origen, no doubt
illustrate the author's general thought, while they are, assuredly,
most suggestive studies of the subjects with which they deal. But
I fancy most readers, who have properly grasped the scope of the
Bishop s original purpose, would gladly exchange them for the papers
on Homer, Heraclitus, Virgil, Epictetus, Plotinus, which he projected
and which unfortunately have remained unwritten.
The keynote of the book is struck in the quotation from the
Epistle to the Hebrews, prefixed to the first Essay, ' On the Myths
of Plato': ' They that say such things declare plainly that they
seek a country.' Plato is here considered not as a philosopher, not
as a lawgiver, not as a mystic, but as a prophet inspired, as Quintilian
said, 'by the spirit of the Delphic oracle.' The Platonic myth is
admirably described by Dr. Westcott as 'a possible material repre
sentation of a speculative doctrine, which is affirmed by instinct, but
not capable of being established by a scientific process': a description,
indeed, not holding true of all the Platonic stories, some of which
should rather be termed allegories. Plato knew that principles, so long
as they remain abstract, are inoperative; that only when, so to speak,
they have been made flesh and have dwelt among us in concrete
form, do they exercise much power; that truth must be ' embodied
in a tale' if it is to touch the heart.
The myths of Plato (Dr. "Westcott writes) remain an unfailing testimony to
the religious wants of man. They show not only that reason, by its logical pro
cesses, is unable to satisfy them, but also in what directions its weakness is most
apparent and least supportable. They form, as it were, a natural scheme of the
questions with which a revelation might be expected to deal—creation, providence
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